[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
If the professor in my department are right, those projects require interdisciplinary methodologies, team work across disciplines and interpretive rather than observational skills. You also need people who can have a mystical experience, who have some actual experience and training.

Krimel replied:
Ok, your professor it right. It does take that kind of team and that kind of experimental subject. Here it is. In practice complete with control group: http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/pubs/2004/meditators_synchrony.pdf   Your wishes have been granted. What do you make of it?

dmb says:
As far as I can tell everyone on that team was working within a single discipline. Its true the half of the test subjects were expert at putting themselves in a meditative state, but they apparently played no real role in interpreting the data or in contributing other forms of data. Their expertise was almost exclusively used in their role as an object of study. If there was an interdisciplinary team there would have been a few scholars from the humanities department, people who know the history, have read the literature, have compared the various meditative techniques and the quality of the experience from a first-person perspective would be fully explored. 

I have to say that that was a pretty typical example of the science I've been complaining about. "In summary", they say, "the generation of this meditative state was associated with gamma oscillations". They can assert a "positive correlation" between these states and the EEG readings, but any causal relation has yet to be established. Because the tools of inquiry within their discipline limit them to the observation of physical processes they can only tell us that "the size of synchrony patterns increased" which "suggests that large scale brain coordination increases" during these states. These physical phenomena are only associated or correlated with the experience and they are observed from without by people who aren't actually having the experience. And scientifically there is almost nothing we can say about how or why they are correlated. These guys are being careful NOT to reduce the experience to a brain state. The problem here is that that this data, all by itself, is virtually meaningless. 

If you had a pal who believed meditation was utterly meaningless, this would make him think twice. It makes mental states seem 'real' to a hard-core materialist, but it doesn't shed much light on the nature or meaning of such an experience. They're looking at road trips in terms of burning gasoline. Yes, there's no doubt that it will involve some combustion but that's just easiest and the LEAST interesting part of it.

By the way, the first book in their bib (Zen and the Brain) was written by a guy who used to teach at my school. 




_________________________________________________________________
Talk to your Yahoo! Friends via Windows Live Messenger.  Find out how.
http://www.windowslive.com/explore/messenger?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_messenger_yahoo_082008